Internet use has continued to grow at a rapid pace. With this growth, the use of the web has expanded to much more than just web browsing and has allowed many applications to utilize the Internet as well. Unfortunately, the massive expansion of the web has negative consequences as well. There are situations where content on the Internet may be inappropriate. These situations may include Adult oriented material being exposed to children, or use of the Internet against a company's Internet use policy for non-work related activities. Due to the need to block or filter out inappropriate content, web filters have been developed that can be configured to block or monitor inappropriate content based on the environment.
Hardware based web filters are appliances that can be installed on a network to provide web filtering in a centralized place. They also do not require the use of software to be installed on computers on the network making them easier to configure and manage, especially in large environments.
Web filters not only block certain content from reaching a computer on the network, they also log and generate reports based on the activity on the network. This activity report typically contains the computer or user activity including violations to the filtering policy.
A common problem with web filtering and reading the reports is determining the actual user activity that was occurring on the video monitor during the policy violations. The reports will show web site activity as well as violating activity, but it does not provide a visual view of what the user is doing while the violations occur. This can lead to ambiguity because there are many situations where computers make automated requests, such as for advertisements, which are not performed by the user but instead are triggered automatically by applications on the computer. When trying to enforce policy or generate an audit trail, it is often desirable to be able to obtain a recording of the computer's video desktop (including mouse movements) at specific times, especially when policy violations are occurring. It may also be desirable to obtain a computer video desktop recording on other computer activity thresholds as well.
When performing computer video desktop recordings, a user typically has to start and stop the recording. This is very disadvantageous as it requires the administrator to determine when the recording should be started and should be stopped. This can be nearly impossible as an administrator may not know when the best time of interest is to start the recording as they would like the recording to start when a threshold of a specific type of activity on the monitored computer has been reached. In addition, this would require the administrator wishing to obtain a recording to sit and monitor the computer via a web filter report log (if available) or physically view the monitor to determine that a recording of the computer's video output is necessary. This can be very tedious and time consuming and in some cases impossible.
The ability to obtain and store video recording's of a computer's desktop based on the computer user's activity on the Internet is a great tool for auditing and tracking actual computer use.
Currently there are software solutions capable of recording a computer's video desktop. In addition, software, such as VNC, can record a desktop over a network connection.
Current solutions can record a computer's video desktop manually by clicking on “start” and “stop” buttons. However, this requires manual user intervention and makes it very difficult to capture relevent video of computer usage as the person triggering the recording must know when to start and stop the recording. This is also very time consuming and not practical in many situations especially for the purpose of web content filtering as the person capturing the video would need to know when to start the recording based on the monitored user's computer or Internet usage. In cases where an administrator would like to record a desktop based on certain actions occurring on a computer, such as opening a program, it is very unpractical as the administrator would need to be in viewing distance of the computer and observe all actions in order to determine a video recording is necessary.
It would be advantageous to provide a recording of a computer's video output.
It would also be advantageous to provide a recording of computer's video output triggered when a specific threshold of activity is reached.
It would also be advantageous to provide a recording of computer's video output triggered when a specific threshold of computer generated network activity is reached.
It would also be advantageous to provide a recording of computer's video output triggered when a specific threshold of computer usage activity is reached.
It would also be advantageous to provide a recording of a computer's video output remotely via a network connection.
It would also be advantageous to provide a recording of a computer's video output by receiving the video stream from tools capable of capturing video output that are currently in installed on the monitored computer, such as VNC.
It would also be advantageous to store video recordings captured from a computer's video output for later viewing.
It would also be advantageous to centrally manage recordings of computers' video on a network with many computers.
It would also be advantageous to configure settings of preferences for when to automatically start the recording, stop the recording, and how long to perform the recording.
It would also be advantageous to monitor network traffic in order to trigger video recordings from existing network equipment such as switches, routers and Internet web filters.
It would further be advantageous to allow a web filter to automatically handle performing, storing, and displaying video recordings.